The planet Earth’s inner core is not a single solid mass but comprised of two layers, and new evidence about the core’s composition from a team of US and Chinese geophysicists suggests that the innermost…

The author posing with a fully-functional model of the Curiosity rover on Earth, not Mars.
November 6, 2014

“All systems go!” I said cautiously with a long sigh of relief. I had approved plans for the first soil analysis that would give humankind clues to the past and future habitability of Mars. One small word…

Volcanism, driven by plate tectonics, built Earth’s atmosphere to make a habitable planet.
Simon Redfern/University of CambridgeOctober 27, 2014

How is it that Earth developed an atmosphere that made the development of life possible? A study published in the journal Nature Geoscience links the origins of Earth’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere to the…

Over time, Earth’s plates went from static to dynamic.
Modestas Jonauskas/FlickrSeptember 17, 2014

Plate tectonics – the large-scale movement of Earth’s lithosphere or outer layers – started around three billion years ago, but how those movements started was a bit of a mystery – until today. With colleagues…

Devastating supervolcanoes can erupt simply due to changes that happen in their giant magma chambers as they slowly cool, according to a new study. This finding marks the first time researchers have been…

Our planet’s interior is complex and has many layers. Their formation and structure contain many unsolved mysteries. But new research is providing some clues about how Earth’s internal structure may have…

A little more than 90 years ago, British geologist Herbert Hall Turner noticed some earthquake data that suggested a surprising explanation. The only way to explain it was if the quake had occurred hundreds…

Injecting fluids into the Earth, whether to recover natural gas or to obtain thermal energy from the planet, can cause earthquakes. New reports that look at American fracking, deep waste-water injection…